For the serious discussion and analysis of games played on a computer, board, field or any other interactive media. The actual interaction and nature of the games are preferred topics, but other elements on top of this are welcome, as long as they are within the context of interactive media.

Discussion in the comments is highly encouraged.

When submitting links please include the author's name and the original title.

Please do not vote on articles you have not read.

For those unfamiliar with Ludology, you may find Jesper Juul's blog The Ludologist a great read for the topics we're looking for and discussing here.

The implicit assumption the author skirts around is that people should be spending the bulk of their free time bettering themselves. Even people who don't play lots of video games probably spend the bulk of their free time fucking around on the internet or watching TV (or both). Could you do better things with your time than play a video game? Sure. The real question is: if you weren't committing that time to a game, would you? It's most likely the case that people who are inclined to read Tolstoy and take classes are going to anyway, regardless of whether or not they have other hobbies like gaming.

Well, further to that, a deeper implicit assumption is that reading Tolstoy is somehow inherently valuable. Even if we assume that time should be spent bettering oneself, there are plenty of successful, healthy, motivated, empowered people who would tell you that, at the end of the day, reading Tolstoy is little more than intellectual wankery (or somesuch) and that your time would be better spent elsewhere. To those people, 100 hours of gaming would probably equal 100 hours of Tolstoy - both would be ultimately fruitless endeavours.

But the fruit is our offspring is it not. And if not our offspring then those who we influence. Look at all the people Jesus or Einstein have influenced, that is the fruit of their labour. If that does not bring any satisfaction then keep in mind that you can at least have a better life here on earth if you work to realize your potentials while you are still alive. Geez, even a new born baby is going to die some day but that does not negate the fact that the babe will probably live a fairly long life with ups and downs of all sorts.

You're attaching a morbid lechery to death. While it is true that life is short and that you will be completely forgotten in 4 generations I fail to see a problem with that. Steve Jobs, NDT, and some modern "philosophers" find meaning in simply being trillions of atoms contemplating being made of trillions of atoms. Think of enjoying the journey for what it is without worrying about the destination.

Im sorry but go tell a dying child who is suffering that they shouldn't worry but be happy because they are trillions of atoms. They couldn't care less about that kinda talk. I guess seeing death on a daily basis makes me a fatalist.

The thing is that I had plans for yesterday evening, I'm reading a good book and I wanted to play around with some web programming. Instead I spent the one and a half hours of free time I had on Reddit.

Reddit has several problems, one is that I spend too much time on it, another is that the subjects I read about are random instead of the things I had planned to read about today, another is the stupid irresistable urge I have to go into discussions with people and try to appear clever.

My problem is that I have access to reddit at work, so I'm able to catch up on everything during the day. But once I get home I still feel an impulse to come onto the site. I sit there, staring at the project I'm working on and then click back over to reddit. It's terrible. I think I need to install this Leechblock program when I get home.

One of my favorite features of leechblock is that it can block a site after a predified frequency of visit, say 10m in any given 12hr period. Setting both numbers lower allows you to keep checking the frontpage every so often without letting any of them explode into massive reddit marathons.

I think i got linked here from /r/depthub, i have no interest in the article because it seems like the title is a silly question, so i went for the comments to see if I was any wrong, shaggorama quickly confirmed I wasn't, but what matters is that as I read the following comments, I found yours and actually tagged you as awesome.

Honestly, Reddit and the internet in general has opened my mind to a VAST variety of subjects that I would otherwise know nothing about. I've been told on multiple occasions by different people that I seem to know a little bit about everything, and I largely have the internet to thank for that.

this is also why I hate it so much. I spend way too much time on here, instead of studying but I convince myself that what I learn here is more important. It is easy to turn down video games and make other lifestyle changes but I still feel like it is beneficial and trying to balance just takes a much greater effort than quitting something cold-turkey.

Oh totally, nothing is totally bad for you. Everything has its benefits in moderation. I think it's funny that we've had a backlash against video games and have romanticized reading and books. I'm of the opinion that ~200+ hours is a tad excessive for a video game (you've diminished returns considerably by that point) but I don't see how 200+ hours of reading the same book wouldn't have the same diminished returns after a certain point.

I'm sure someday video games will be in the same class as books and movies/television (which are somewhere in between books and video games in terms of perceived educational value and as an art form) but until something new comes along and supplants it, there will always be retards arguing that books are inherently the superior art form.

I stood in line for 16 hours to get a new iphone. I am a native russian speaker and speak french. I only got through the first book and a few pages of the first tome. how did you even read half of it not to mention all of it.

noted it probably counts as 10 hours of regular reading time due to discomfort/distraction. but still. i can read half the harry potter books in that time

Video games have arcs that should be contextualized, hefty themes, and dynamic characters with emotional tribulations. But, a lot of the "gaming world" doesn't talk about the finer points of video game storys, even among themselves, so I wouldn't expect most people to know this. Reading can be more rewarding because you have to render your own images. Just like video games can be rewarding because you have to physically move the plot forward yourself. Just because Tolstoy makes the reader ask "What the hell is going on?" doesn't mean that he's any more involving or enriching, he just is in a different manner. TL; DR: You only get out what you look for/put in.

Reddit is an online newspaper. You are enriching your mind by being here.

Yes you can certainly 'waste' your time, but you could also say reading the comics section is a waste of time. I wish the notion that if its digital, especially if its tied to the internet, it's a waste of time would go away.

Thanks to heavy news consumption, many people have lost
the reading habit and struggle to absorb more
than four pages straight.

Lol that right there made me not want to read it. How can you say that right out the bat? Really?

I'll give it a ready later on though. Seems interesting, especially in a society in which we are constantly connected to information. I think it's going to be hard to prove that constant information is a negative though.

From my nth-hand observations I'd say games like Journey are rather poetic, don't knock us gamers too much. I think a major distinguishing characteristic here is the intent of the creators. I imagine when Tolstoy wrote his works first and foremost he was interested in realizing his creative vision. The developers of Dark Souls however may be more interested in maintaining the solvency of their studio (including their jobs) than creating a powerful experience. Not to say that the only artistic meaning one can derive from a work is that the creator put in, but Tolstoy may have a higher density of instrumentally meaningful content.

The question seems to be more along the lines of, "Is this game, that is getting such great critical acclaim, worth as much to humanity as some of the great works of literature or film?"

As the article stated, there is some beauty and some powerful themes in Dark Souls. But you can absorb all of that in the first few hours. The remainder of your time spent playing the game is spent recycling through the same themes.

If your primary goal is to just play around with some interesting mechanics, and you don't mind playing with those same mechanics for hundreds of hours on end, then Dark Souls can be good for you. But if you want to experience the "artistic" aspect of the experience, you won't get anything new past the first few hours of gameplay.

Edit: I'm not trying to argue that time spent playing games for many, many hours is worthless. If you're looking for relaxation-time entertainment, it's probably more valuable for you to do something like play a challenging game, rather than to sit back and watch most of what is on television.

But it's still good to put it all in perspective, especially for people genuinely interested in somehow creating art or communicating an important message through their work.

even people who read for their entertainment don't constantly read difficult and long philosophical books, they read entertainment books with lots of action and little density like Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, something by Vonnegut or Murakami

That's an atrocious list. The only one among them that is incredibly low-level is Harry Potter. Vonnegut, GoT, Murakami are definitely a large step above the likes of Rowling, Meyers, Brown, etc. Clearly there's still a gap between them and classic lit, but the reason they are much easier to read is because they use modern language.

By what reckoning is Vonnegut not considered classic literature? Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat's Cradle are both widely considered to be masterpieces. I fail to see any reason that one can consider War and Peace to be a more significant work of art than Cat's Cradle.

By what reckoning? My own completely arbitrary and meaningless view on what is a classic. Unfortunately there is no agreed upon list of classics, so I have nothing to go on. Keep in mind I don't dislike Vonnegut, in fact my comment was entirely in defense of those books being more than just mindless entertainment action books.

The point I was trying to make had nothing to do with quality, and everything to do with accessibility.

shaggorama: "Even people who don't play lots of video games probably spend the bulk of their free time fucking around on the internet or watching TV"

For some reason I thought that he was indicating that TV is inherently plebian, and reading intellectual. I wanted people to keep in mind just as there's a depth difference between movies and cinema, just as there's a gradient of literature between books, and classics.

Really? Rowling in the same list as Meyers and Brown? Just because Rowling isn't a modern wordsmith like Cormac McCarthy doesn't mean she isn't an epic story teller. The same is absolutely not true of Meyers or Brown who rely on insecure romance and deus ex twists to draw readers.

It's always strange when I hear people demean Harry Potter as frilly entertainment. Those are some well-crafted stories with incredibly meaningful and universal commentary on the basic things that are important to humans.

At first, I was going to downvote. But, I realized you are completely right.

I love HP, but, damn, it's written with a middle school vocabulary. Something doesn't have to be wordy to be complex or deep -- as HP is; however, there is more to be said about death, love, and coming into oneself than HP has to say. And they require a bit more stimulating phrases than "BLOODY HELL!"

When making the case for Dark Souls, almost every defender stumbles into the affective fallacy, wherein the value of a work is tied to the emotions it dredges up from its audience.

I find it curious that the linked wiki article on "Affective fallacy" contains:

As with many concepts of New Criticism, the concept of the affective fallacy was both controversial and, though widely influential, never accepted wholly by any great number of critics.
[...]
While the term remains current as a warning against unsophisticated use of emotional response in analyzing texts, the theory underlying the term has been thoroughly eclipsed by more recent developments in criticism.

I have not played Dark Souls, so I can't speak to whether or not I personally would defend the game in this way. Nonetheless, I'm not particularly impressed by the author's dismissal of other reviews based solely on an outdated and inaccurately titled "fallacy". It sounds to me like the author's argument boils down to "stop having fun, you guys"-- as if enjoyment of a game for 100 hours isn't enough if it isn't constantly divulging new and excitingly deep secrets of the human condition.

Indeed, there's also name for the fallacy that people employ when dismissing time spent playing games as less valuable than the alternative of reading Tolstoy and learning a foreign language. It's called a false dichotomy. Likely what the author and everyone else would be doing instead of playing Dark Souls is the exact same thing they do every other day.

And if you spent every day reading Tolstoy and studying foreign languages I suppose you've earned a little free time to play whatever the hell you want anyway.

I agree there's a false dichotomy, but I see it a little differently: games are really old things, and human beings tend to like them (Go, Chess, etc). Plenty of smart and productive people have enjoyed these traditional games and developed their game skills to a high level of competency while remaining quite productive individuals otherwise. An obvious recent example is Humphrey Bogart, who was a very good chess player in addition to rising to the top of his craft as an actor. In some incarnations, I fear that the anti-video-game view on this issue reveals a notion that the "true" human being is one without play, something that appears (to me, anyway) to be rejected by several of the modern philosophers I have read: Derrida and Rorty come to mind particularly quickly.

So on to the false dichotomy: why are these traditional games viewed as fundamentally different than video games? On what ground do we make this claim? Because computers are involved? So Chess on a computer would be fundamentally different from chess on the kitchen table? I don't buy it. What if Chess had been developed for the computer?

And here we run into something that needs differentiation: there are hundreds of games produced every year by a variety of developers and publishers. Each has a set of mechanics, atmosphere, gameplay, etc (all to a greater or lesser degree). Many are mindless, obviously produced to make a quick buck, demand little thinking, and so forth. Perhaps if someone spends all of their time playing something requiring little thought, we could say it's a "waste." But again, how is this different than reading dimestore novels that play on stereotypes and ask nothing of the mind?

So what we have in the title question is somebody sticking one of the greatest writers ever, read avidly a century and a half after his death and in languages he did not know, up against an entire (very young) media and asking for a comparison of value. I don't see any way to do this without getting really specific about the comparison one is interested in making. Additionally, (as above and below) people seem to be hashing out what yardstick to use to measure "value" in this sense, which is a particularly nasty problem because it involves normative statements about what someone else should be doing with their (free) time. I'll even go as far as conceding that (in general) story-based games, IMHO, have not risen to anywhere near the level of a good novel in terms of timbre and probing of emotional/social questions. Even so, to begrudge someone this enjoyment in their free time seems silly. Where addiction is a factor, the story is obviously different.

Speaking from personal experience: I've read a chunk of Tolstoy, I do research on economic history for a job, and I love Starcraft II because it's a demanding strategic experience much like Chess or Go. Additionally, I play/scheme with friends, making it a social experience to boot.

So on to the false dichotomy: why are these traditional games viewed as fundamentally different than video games? On what ground do we make this claim? Because computers are involved? So Chess on a computer would be fundamentally different from chess on the kitchen table? I don't buy it. What if Chess had been developed for the computer?

There are big differences between videogames and traditional games which call into question any attempt to completely conflate them.

Firstly, by virtue of being on a computer, and having access to so much processing power, videogames are able to enact much more complicated rules than any other kind of game (bar perhaps the rules of physics which are built into physical sports). If I can be forgiven for linking to myself, a choose-your-own-adventure style 'military training manual' called Infantry Combat illustrates this very aptly. There is a limit to the complexity of rules that a pen-and-paper or board-and-dice system can incorporate, but computers raise this limit by several orders of magnitude. The difference is so great that the videogame form gives rise to entirely different kinds of game: minute simulations of physical processes, emergent playgrounds, autonomous AI characters...

Secondly, this processing power means that videogames, unlike almost any other kind of game, are automated, which is to say they are other. When we play a meatspace game, it is we or our friends who enact and observe the rules, we who move the pieces or turn the pages or draw up the character sheets. When a computer does this for us, the abstracted world it simulates assumes a kind of reality it cannot otherwise possess. It appears to be autonomous, independent of us, and this makes a great difference to the experience and consumption of the work. The idea of 'immersion' is one that only really comes into existence with videogames, and those who (very reasonably) compare videogames with Chess or Go seem to forget just how many more videogames, and how few traditional ones, are single-player. Chess isn't much different when it's on a computer, but Braid or Half-Life would be very different if they weren't.

Thirdly, the clue is in the name. The video in 'videogames' (which is my own preferred term, partly for this reason and partly because I am militantly in love with how trashy it sounds) is almost as important, if not perhaps always just as important, as the game. This is because videogames are accessed through the same equipment and by the same moving-image methods as film and TV. Players of videogames have no direct access to their rules, and can only assume or intuit these rules through the audiovisual feedback they receive. If a game for some reason simulated a fully 3D world and a player avatar within it but for some reason only showed white noise on the screen, it would be no more playable than a novel. Videogames are thus a hybrid form, and the relationship of videogames to traditional games is very broadly analogous to that of cinema to theatre. The former subsumes the latter, and uses its methods for something similar but new (while of course leaving some things behind).

Actually, video games are remarkably more similar to books than movies and tv. People call them video games to differentiate them from more traditional games, but the act of playing a game is nearly identical to reading a book. Books are active, it literally doesn't happen unless the reader does something with the material, just like a game. A movie, on the other hand, doesn't necessarily mean anything without a viewer, but it still functions, whereas the book or game literally stops when the consumer stops consuming it.

I also think you're wrong to say people don't interact with the rules, they just interact differently. You are right to say people don't have to hold the rules in their heads, but they are entirely constrained by the rules of the game in a way they're not in, say chess. If I'm playing chess I could move a piece in a way the rules don't allow for. I wouldn't be playing chess properly, but it could happen. In a game you literally (that word again, more later) can't do anything the rules don't account for. In most cases. So the entire action of the game is actually running up against the rules, interacting with them, so on, so on.

I said more on the liberal use of "literal." Games are a construction that literalize a lot of the things that are happening covertly in any active form of entertainment.

This is a fantastic response: I largely agree with your comments, insofar as I understand them, about the substantially different experience of videogames when compared to traditional games.

My comment was much more focused on the function they have for the player on a day to day level than drawing a perfect equivalence, so I'll ask: do you think the subjective function of videogames is substantially different from traditional games due to this more complex/different experiential aspect? By this I mean that do players play a strategy videogame for different reasons than they play chess for reasons relating to the things you mentioned like visual mediation/more complex rules?

Id be particularly interested in a comparison between something like KOTOR/Baulders Gate and real world D&D.

That's an interesting set of questions! I think the short answer is (predictably enough), "sometimes and partly".

It's clear that many videogames (strategy games in particular) are very similar in their form, outlook and objectives to traditional games. The experience of testing yourself in a rule-based environment is a very big part of why people play both, and the intellectual challenge of an interesting puzzle is primary among my own reasons for doing so. But because of the factors I outlined above, videogames can offer challenges of a pretty different nature to any other game. Their 'autonomy' (or capacity for otherness) is very important here: chess does not offer in the same way the experience of submerging myself into and slowly coming to understand an autonomous system (i.e. "okay, so here I am in the world of Minecraft..."). This, which videogames do very well, has much more in common for me with submerging myself in a good book or movie, which I do most often because I want to see how it works.

This leads to the other big reason people play videogames: transport and fantasy. A lot of people will justify their purchasing and playing decisions in terms of wanting to go somewhere else, experience something else, wanting to 'be' a soldier or astronaut or post-nuclear survivalist. This element of simulation is tremendously important in the discourse surrounding games, and has sometimes been seen as their raison d'etre. Think back to how often you've read or heard an idea or claim which made the implicit or explicit assumption that the logical end-point of the videogame form was a VR-style "total simulation" indistinguishable from the real world. I believe that's only half the story, but, because of the power of the computer and because of its 'autonomous' capacity, it's something that videogames do uniquely well.

It's also possible for people to play videogames because they want to see what happens in the plot or because they want to feel emotions or whatever - I add these as an afterthought because they are rarely very important to me and I suspect that they seldom exist without being 'contaminated' by the other reasons I have spent more time on.

...and of course sometimes people play videogames because they want to learn something, or because the need to for a course, or because their friend wants them to, or because they're curious, or because they want to analyse it as art, or because they read an article about it and want to see if the article is total bullshit.

I also think there's a pretty important social dimension to most trad games, where the reasons for playing are "I want something cool to do with my friend" or "I want to test my mind against another mind". Obviously, this is also the case for MP videogames, where the factor of autonomy is not so important. Then again, our social contact with videogame opponents is of a very different nature to our contact with Chess and football opponents. Indeed, in its anonymity, numerical scale, distance and potential for deception I would say it is once again of a nature almost unique to the videogame form.

Ah, good point. I should have remembered that the place I hear that term the most is in the World of Warcraft roleplaying community. Nevertheless, that's interesting in light of Jesper Juul's belief that videogames combine the rules of games with the fiction of other media. D&D and PnP systems appear to anticipate videogames (or rather, videogames take from the same tendency) in combining their rule framework with a fiction and inviting players to imagine the game as a metaphor for something which is 'really' happening.

I think it's a tough lesson that some people have to learn -- you can't always be working toward something. It's detrimental to your psychological well-being. The mind needs to be able to relax and enjoy things that are simply fun. Nothing against the pillar of learning, but it's not very fun for a lot of people, so there are very few people who are comfortable constantly working on something.

I would not discount it entirely. There's entire genres made exclusively to exploit cheap, easy emotion, that show little care for artistic merit.

I'm an easy guy to get to identify to characters. Have a character die needlessly after working for hours (or chapters) in making me like them will dredge up powerful emotions from me. What is the statement from the artist? Shit happens? Just because the character was likeable doesn't mean it was art. And writing a likable character requires talent, but it's not an artistic statement. I've liked characters in advertising.

First off, let's set up a value. The author clearly values self-improvement through non-productive activities (consumption, not production), so we'll use "self-improvement".

Tolstoy is better because reading great literature improves you as a person by exposing you to ideas and stories. Videogames do this as well, only as the author points out, they do so in a far more limited capacity. In videogames, there is far more inane nonsense that players have to spend time learning before getting to the really good stuff. For example, shooting lightning spells at gargoyles -- I would argue that doing this in a videogame is filler content.

This may be a controversial point, but from the perspective of the value I've established I think the actual mechanics of a videogame are "negative" in value. In other words, any game that spends time being a game is already on poor footing.

On the other hand exposing us to game mechanics, especially in the case of "opaque" games like Dark Souls, teaches us to experiment, learn systems and solve problems. All of the arbitrary bits of Dark Souls force the player to experiment. Perhaps you can't beat the gargoyles because your execution is flawed. Perhaps you need more healing items. Perhaps you need to try to get in close. Perhaps you need to fight from range.

In the case of the gargoyles, once you happen upon their weakness, they are trivial. But beyond that, once you learn that creatures have weaknesses and that exploiting them is vital, that becomes another trick in your bag and I bet that the next arbitrarily unbeatable creature you meet, you will think, "perhaps I can use fire this time." What was once arbitrary is now part of a knowable system... I think science works like this :)

A similar concept applies to tweaking your stats in an RPG. Are you improved as a human being because you can come up with a killer pvp build, or min-max the crap out of your Champions character? Maybe. Engineers often have to make trade-offs in cost/performance much like the pvp gamer and if you know tax law AND can squeeze 50 points out of a Champions character, you can be my accountant any day.

It's the same mistake critics of video games make over and over. They compare video games to a static medium, like books or movies, which shows they just don't understand what they're talking about.

A medium where you follow a predetermined, linear path through a narrative; sounds like both a book and a narrative-driven game, to me. Games where you compete against other people are very different to the linear obstacle courses JRPGs, platformers and Joyce present to us. Books are static in the same way that a piece of code is static. You just have to use a very special pair of glasses to read it.

Books are static in the same way that a piece of code is static. You just have to use a very special pair of glasses to read it.

That would be true if you were reading the code, but not while playing it. Even very linear "story" games like Uncharted, are actually guiding you through a series of interactive stages with story elements in between.

The truth is that in a game like Demon's Souls that you can play for 40-50 hours, there's probably only 10-15 minutes of cut scenes and "story" with the remainder all consisting of interactivity.

Compare the "story" in that game with an equivalent 15 minute short film or short story and you'll see a lot more parallels than when you compare a game to a novel.

Now compare the story in a game like Planescape Torment whose script contains 800,000 words and you'll see a deeper novel-esque story. However, I'm sure that Planescape's dialog isn't all solely around the main plotline which you would see in a book.

No, I'm just saying that to say that they are radically different is too simplistic. You're forgetting that all mediums fall along a sliding scale of interactivity. The act of reading is the act of committing meaning to words. You are interacting with a linear narrative. What is turning a page, if not interactive? What about books that force you to go backwards and forwards, like Pale Fire? What about books where you can interpret it in radically different ways? I'm talking specifically about video games with a linear narrative here. Something like Half Life - the only real difference is that, at every stage, you're tested to see if you kept up. Kinda like if James Joyce had implemented a system where if you didn't understand a line of Ulysses, you had to work at it until you did.

Of course there is such things as degrees of interactivity - think of it in terms of hot and cold mediums (a term coined by Marshall Mcluhan).

Music is really damn hot. If we are in the vicinity, our ears receive soundwaves, and in order to turn them into music, we need to do a small amount of cogitation. Films are less so, because even though if we keep our eyes open we receive all the data, it requires slightly more effort to turn it into a narrative. Books are his example of a cold medium, because you need to do a LOT to turn the words on the page into a story. I just don't buy this idea of a passive reader. Where do videogames fall on this scale? Are they the coldest medium of all?

I don't understand your biography example and the painting by numbers. They aren't good analogies, or if they are, I'm missing their force.

The last time I checked, they weren't making competitive Tolstoy leagues and there's no high score for reading Tolstoy.

The last time I checked, this wasn't the point of reading.

I don't understand how the fact that Tolstoy doesn't "challenge your reaction" time is a criticism. Reading isn't the same thing as playing a game so you can't judge it like playing a game. That's like saying doing mathematics or physics isn't worthwhile because it doesn't challenge your reaction time. What's the point of challenging your reaction time anyway? Something done quickly is not done best. In serious thought, your reaction time isn't going to mean anything.

Playing a video game is not like reading a book. This doesn't mean reading a book is "better" though or vice versa because the notion of which is "better" in the abstract doesn't mean anything. There are no standards or definitions here: no one can possibly answer this question because no one can possibly know what to look for.

Do whatever you want. If you like playing video games, then play video games. If you like to read, then read. The most I can weigh in on this is to say that I don't see that video games will have the same relevance in 100 years the way Tolstoy does today. I think you'll learn and grow and think a lot more reading War and Peace than you will playing Half Life but that only means War and Peace is better in that it leads to those ends. It's not objective, it juts depends what you want out of it.

Sorry, couldn't resist bringing that quote up- I don't mean to be flip, but I do think that it is worth questioning whether "self-improvement" should be uncritically upheld as a certainly good end in itself; at least, we should ask the question, "what is this self-improvement aimed at?" If we have an answer for that question, then we will be in a better position to judge the values of the self-improvement activity.

...but I am going to set that point aside momentarily so that I might spend more time taking on the following point that you make, before ultimately getting back to this matter of "self-improvement." Your point of primary interest to me is this:

I think the actual mechanics of a videogame are "negative" in value.

I would like to suggest that the actual mechanics of both reading and playing video games are fairly mundane, but there should not be any doubt that the mechanics of playing videogames are more complex and varied than the mechanics of reading. (I am going to continue to place the word "mechanics" in italics in order to draw attention to the fact that I am using it in a specialized sense that I will elucidate in this post- not because I am trying to sound sarcastic.)
The mechanics of reading involve scanning a printed page with the eye in a linear pattern and decoding the printed characters into recognizable utterances of human speech. That is all that I am willing to admit into a discussion about the mechanics of the activity; the minimal motor and cognitive functions that are necessary to the task and that may be relied upon to be fairly consistent from reader to reader. The mechanics of playing a videogame involve scanning a monitor in dynamic patterns that vary in response to visual and auditory stimulus and providing coordinated input to the videogame system. Those are the mechanics of playing a videogame. It think that it is clear that if we are going to judge these mediums on the basis of their mechanics, videogames clearly provide a more challenging experience and an experience with greater potential for "self-improvement." (Reading is, in any case, subsumed within the medium of videogames so it did not have much hope of being a contender in this contest.)

This difference in the nature of underlying mechanics translates in differences in the ways that creative works are structured in videogames. The advancement of a videogame depends not just on narrative progress and character development, but also on a steady increase in the complexity of the specific mechanical processes that are involved in playing the game. That is why the game makes you slay so many gargoyles: it has to train you to develop a base of skills that will support the acquisition of related skills that will advance the game- so that when you reach the end of the game, you will be able to manage the combination of whatever dozens of spells, techniques, armors, and weapons are necessary to complete the game. What may seem like "filler content" from the perspective of narrative progress, may be essential content from the perspective of a game design that is structured to gradually develop the abilities of the person playing the game until that person can complete tasks that he would have initially found to be unmanageably complex.

If you follow my reasoning then I think it should be apparent that if we take "self-improvement" to be our ultimate value, then we should come to the conclusion that we should be spending more time playing video games than reading books, since to make progress through a videogame a person absolutely must become a better player of that videogame whereas to make progress through a novel a person does not necessarily have to become a better reader. Of course, this would be open to the counterpoint that it is not sufficient for something to merely be "self-improvement-" we must also consider the scope of that self-improvement activity, how it benefits the society and the individual, etc., but I think that discussion would become rather unwieldy and would be open to numerous points from both sides. To provide a little taste of where this could go, here is a scholarly review of 12 studies that suggest video game experience might be beneficial to a future career in surgery: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20630431

Self-improvement gives me a lot of skills and abilities. Ones that led to more income, and, in a few years, retirement in my late 40s. I'll be starting in on a fourth degree this August and intend to keep learning and doing things.

Video games are empty calories. A waste of time with no benefits. Studies that suggest benefits to surgeons? Please. 99.999% of people who waste time on pointless games will never set foot in a medical school.

Also, you don't know a thing about literature. I have a degree in it. The body of literature refers back on itself and draws from many common sources. If you read a lot of literature, then yes, you do become a better reader.

You're overthinking the value of games. They do not give you skills you can't find anywhere else. They do not create or build anything. They do not help other people. They do not earn income. They do not create value in any sort of way.

Over the past week, I taught children at work, helped rebuild two apartments we'll be renting out, set up a scrollsaw, and soldered a new amp together.

What did you do? Eat Cheetos and play games?

What value does your hours of gaming have to others? Not one thing. You have nothing after spending 100 hours on games. 100 hours on the apartments which generate income every month. Do you get a couple grand each month because you played a game in the past? Further, you haven't learned anything important, you did not create anything that can be appreciated by others, you have done precisely nothing.

Me? I taught kids to do new things. The apartments will be a nice place to live and earn income. The scrollsaw will help me earn money making things for others. The amp can be used or sold.

In comparison, you haven't done shit.

Empty calories. You are wasting your life. Fine with me if you want to waste your life, it doesn't affect me. But if you feel angry about this response, put down the controller and do something productive.

It's important to read the entire comment before replying to it. What was being discussed was the difference between literature and video games in terms of the opportunities for self-improvement they offer.
Phillyjama was definitely not attempting to argue that playing video games is a better method of self-improvement than formal education or work experience.

This ad hominem is really off-base; nothing that I wrote justifies these assumptions about my qualifications or my professional and recreational activities. I wrote my response to cokeisaheluvadrug based on the content of his/her post because I was interested in the issues that he raised and I did my best to focus on those issues in an organized and methodical way.

I would not say that I am angry at your response, but I am puzzled by the anger- and the unnecessary assumptions- that your response seems to project onto me. I actually do not play video games that much, but as a college professor in the field of information science, I am quite interested in how video games can be used to train people to accomplish sophisticated tasks. I believe that some of that intellectual interest comes across in my reply to cokeisaheluvadrug.

I am not going to take you up on the question of the value of video games that you raise because you have not shown yourself to be capable of having a rational discussion; however, if you are interested in learning more about the topic, I point you toward the following works by James Gee- they are scholarly, but accessible:

Incidentally, in addition to my academic achievements, I would also count my 10 years of happy marriage, black belt in Judo, and involvement with a charity for at-risk youth as some of my notable accomplishments; it is not exactly like being able to boast that I soldered an amp and set up a scrollsaw, but it is hardly fair to say that I "haven't done shit."

Along those lines of value based on "self-improvement", there's the fact that a life lesson learned in a Tolstoy novel is deeper and more complex than one learned in a modern video game, narratively and textually speaking. While there's nothing stopping a fan of some game from placing a deeper, more complex meaning upon a game's story, the game itself does not demonstrate a comparable depth. You can literally point to the actual sentences and passages in a work of literature that make it deep. You cannot do an equivalently thorough analysis on a video game. You'd be left with the patchwork of cracks and plotholes they're often comprised of.

In other words, not only is the story in a work of literature unimpeded by game mechanics, but it also tends to be of higher quality.

Then there's the cultural value in reading great literature. I know we tend to blame culture for the lack of cultural value in playing video games, but that's no reason to fault literature for having some. It started out the same way, after all, and has rightly earned its place. Even if games were seen as culturally acceptable (and indeed they've made progress I think), they wouldn't be as valuable as literature.

So, why is Tolstoy worth more? Because it's in a better medium, with better methods of conveying its most important concepts, is better accepted culturally, and is qualitatively better crafted. In short: because it's better.

Now, is there some amount of time with Tolstoy that could be compared to some amount of time with a video game? I don't think so. Part of the reason literature is a "better" medium at all is because games haven't quite grown into their own. Sticking with a game longer doesn't improve this awkwardness.

I strongly disagree that literature is a "better" medium than the videogame on any fundamental level. It might be true that artists in literature have achieved a higher mastery of their form and its artistic uses than artists in videogames...but that's no slur against videogames, because the best literary artists are INCREDIBLE and they've had hundreds of years since the printing press alone. There's no reason to assume that interactivity is a worse method of imparting ideas than any other - in fact, because games are essentially teaching mechanisms, it may turn out to be one of the best. If the story in a game is "impeded by game mechanics", then the developers have screwed up pretty profoundly.

Likewise, it is perfectly possibly to point to the actual rules, dynamics and sequences in a work of video gam (??) that make it deep.

If the story in a game is "impeded by game mechanics", then the developers have screwed up pretty profoundly.

The fundamental difference between literature and games is that literature has to make no concessions whatsoever for the sake of the story, whereas games have a laundry list of points that have to be balanced. Fun, game mechanics, revenue, story, all have to be brought together into a single package, and the simple fact is that there's no way to prioritize everything to the same level. A skilled wordsmith can put together a manuscript in a year while working nights tending bar; a game requires the coordinated, full-time efforts of many people and often something has to give in order to ship a quality project relatively on time and under budget.

All this said, every medium offers particular advantages that no other medium can offer. One thing that I'm reminded of at this point is the battle against Zeus in God of War 3. Once you finally gain the advantage over him and have him at your mercy, the camera switches to a first-person QTE context where you're beating the defeated god into a bloody pulp. Finally, it prompts the player to mash the circle button, and with each brutal pounding, the screen becomes covered with more and more blood. Now, here's the brilliant part - the game never prompts you to stop, and will in fact allow you to keep smashing Zeus' face well past the point that he's utterly destroyed. This moment of realization, the "what have I become?", is something that no other medium can possibly produce.

And in fact, War and Peace is a good example of something that is hard to do in a game.

One of its main points is that one person, like Napoleon, doesn't make history -- everybody is more or less along for the ride, he couldn't have decided not to go into Russia.

That's a point that would be incredibly hard to make in a game. After all, in games you are the one deciding what happens. A game in which even the player is just a cog in a giant world without much control over his destiny wouldn't be much of a fun game.

All games promote the idea that you have control over history. Tolstoy's point was basically that such a view of history is fantasy.

Actually, when I play most games I feel like I have no control at all over history, and am following some sort of predetermined path. The player is never really the one who decides what happens, and game developers don't make an infinite number of possible game-futures, and in fact, even in a sandbox type game, there's only a couple main paths you can take. In a more linear game, the player often has no control at all over history, or at least the events of it. Instead, they are tasked with figuring out how to make their character fulfill their destiny as a hero.

Mass Effect 1 and 2 make basically the same point you've described for War and Peace, by the way. (I can't speak for 3, haven't played it yet.) I was stuck with an overwhelming sense of inevitability the whole time I was playing. The player IS a cog in a giant world, many characters manipulate Shepard throughout the series.

Even cruder games like the Half-Life series are like this. It's not all that deep but the player is basically pushed from one impossible and absurd situation into the next with absolutely no regard for his safety. People depend on him and place insane amounts of trust on his shoulder seemingly unwarranted.

"We know you can do this! You are really important Gordon! Now go inside the rocket engine testing chamber with the gigantic tentacle monsters that react to sound by striking out and killing you instantly."

At the same time it it paints a picture of the inevitability of death, the face of oppression and the hopelessness of resistance. At the same time the player is conflicted. He/She is not there to fight for humanity. He has no connection to the people he is fighting alongside with. He is a pawn of the G-man and of the resistance, Dr. Kleiner, Dr. Vance, Alyx and a number of other characters that constantly pull the rug out from under him and send him off in different directions against ever more imposible opponents. He is not fighting for justice or freedom or anything else. He is fighting so he can take his next breath and fight again.

Quite. There aren't many games in which the capacity to change history or really affect events - the ability to wield any kind of real agency - is anything more than a plot point in a cut-scene. And it would probably be possible to create a high-agency game where history inevitably happened anyway.

Quite a few modern games make this exact point the center of their story. Bioshock did it blatantly, and rather well. Having your own actions brought into question is much more powerful than having the same thing discussed in a book. Shadow of the Colossus questioned the player's motives quite effectively.

A game in which even the player is just a cog in a giant world without much control over his destiny wouldn't be much of a fun game.

I really agree with a lot of your post, but not necessarily the first paragraph:

Fun, game mechanics, revenue, story, all have to be brought together into a single package, and the simple fact is that there's no way to prioritize everything to the same level.

Fun is ill-defined. "Engaging" may be a better word. But whatever word you choose, writers must strive for that same fun/engaging element in their writing. Otherwise, the books would be boring and no one would read them. I would argue that none of the current trends in game design have to be present at all for a game to be fun or engaging; it's just that we haven't fully developed any other type of engaging experience (though we're really starting to get there in recent years).

Revenue also has little to do with the innate qualities of a game: books are either written to be sold or given away for free. The same is true for games.

What you're describing speaks more to the current state of mainstream gaming, rather than the full spectrum of what an "interactive experience" can be.

Gameplay can fully support and interact with a narrative, it's just that we are limited now by our imaginations, our industries and our tech, all of which are expanding all the time.

Publishers of both books and video games have to choose ones that they think will do well economically, putting pressure on authors and game designers to do what will sell, sometimes at the expense of artistic value.

It sounds like we agree -- within the limited value that we've established, literature is demonstrably more valuable than videogames.

However, I think we need to take a step back here and consider the context of the narrative. For example, a book's narrative is largely without context; it can be a reflection of society, of humanity, of a thing, but it is by its nature a static work of art.

Take the narrative context of videogames, on the other hand; it is the opinion of some game makers that the narrative should only serve to provide a plausible basis for the gameplay (some developers don't even do this). I would argue that videogames are primarily a means of entertainment, and have storylines for the same reason porn does: some people like to imagine themselves in certain situations, but at the end of the day everyone's playing the videogame the same way.

While it's possible that the primary purpose of games is the gameplay, it cannot be said that that is the only purpose. And therein lies the strength of the medium, I think. I'm pretty conservative and I think that film and literature will always have superior narratives to videogames, however that doesn't mean videogame narratives have to be bad.

I think it is a bit shortsighted to say film and literature will always have superior narrative. Consider that the technology that can allow for videogames to have in-depth narrative storytelling hasn't even necessarily existed for much longer than the time as it can take for some great novelists to write a story, never mind a masterpiece... and because the technology is continually evolving still, video game authors feel pressure to put out their games while the graphical elements still don't look "dated". If ever the technology plateaus we may actually find people who will put a decade or more into a video game. Or maybe someone is developing the "Tolstoy of video games" right now. You cannot judge a medium as young as video games with the same metric as a many-decades-old, or several-millenia-old medium. We potentially have many hundreds or thousands of years to explore narrative in interactive digital media.

Tolstoy is better because reading great literature improves you as a person by exposing you to ideas and stories.

That isn't the only reason for reading good books, and several of the posts in this thread have implied that the main value of a novel rests in the ideas it imparts.

I've written another comment about it, but the gist of it is that reading well-written literature is an exercise for the mind in both imagination and adapting to unfamiliar syntax. It is less of a challenge to accept the underlying "idea" of a novel like War and Peace than it is to understand and co-operatively experience the text itself.

I've written [1] another comment about it, but the gist of it is that reading well-written literature is an exercise for the mind in both imagination and adapting to unfamiliar syntax. It is less of a challenge to accept the underlying "idea" of a novel like War and Peace than it is to understand and co-operatively experience the text itself.

That's what I said. The exposure is what improves you as a person, not necessarily the ideas and stories themselves.

I don't think the difference between problem solving in video games and the self-improvement involved in reading is necessarily as divergent as you're making out.

One of the amazing things about literature is the effect of conceptual coherence. That each individual moment can contribute to the whole, over-arching sentiment, philosophy, or whatever you want to take from the book. Tolstoy's thesis is that history makes the man, rather than the other way round. In order to argue this in a complex fashion (and this is how all literature argues) it shows you a series of images and arguments, that in their totality sum up an argument, or a feeling, or a commentary, or whatever. What is particularly fascinating is the fact that you can read Tolstoy and not be improved one bit. You can fail to pay attention. As if you went through a video game and got a 50% completion rating because you didn't find any of the hidden nuggets. I think that video games have such fantastic potential in this vein, because you can put mechanisms in place that force people to think in certain ways. A great example here is Braid: the method of reversing time mirrors the experimentation it's supposed to be about, you are experimenting, trying different pathways, until you finally reach your destination and realise you're a monster, that nuclear war, not nuclear utopia, is the result of your experiments. You get lost in the joy of experimentation - which mirrors that of the scientist. Only the very best literature achieves this level of coherence throughout its entirety, and I think it's preposterous to suggest that Tolstoy does. There is a lot of filler, just like there is in any novel. He has to use it as a vehicle for his grand themes because, as his flop of an essay he ends the book with, they aren't strong enough to stand on their own. He just presents these grand themes and a middling-to-fair philosophy of history and tries to 'prove' it by recounting a fictional tale, a questionable mode of proof if ever there was one.

Anyway, I'm mostly trying to say that mechanics are not necessarily negative, just that when it comes to most games, the mechanics are considered separately from the storyline by the developers, so they end up flawed and incoherent, but that's just because of poor design practise, not a necessary problem with the medium, just a lamentable boundary, due to the amount of work required to make a game.

edit: just re-read what I said and my argument doesn't quite work, because it's disjointed. To sum up: video games involve self-improvement because you have to understand something to progress, whereas with books it's easy to just skip over that stuff. They have great potential to be as affecting as greatliterature for this reason, but it's more difficult. Or perhaps just as difficult, given the relative numeric insignificance of the subset of books we class as great.

I don't think the author's saying that 100 hours of Tolstoy is inherently worth more than 100 hours of videogames, rather 100 hours of anything should have 100 hours worth of content.

A well executed work in any medium should be as long as it needs to be. The author here believes that the entire crux of Dark Souls can be fully understood within the first few hours. While I can't judge Dark Souls itself since I havent' played it, I do think this is a valid criticism for a lot of modern videogames. I know I'm a minority when it comes to "hardcore gamers", but I firmly believe the vast majority of games are way too long nowadays. If you only have 4 hours of interesting gameplay, then make the game 4 hours long, I absolutely hate it when a developer stretches a short game to meet an arbitrary 8-12 hour mark to meet the desires of a more demanding audience.

"But even if a game is padded and repetitive, as long as you had fun for those 100 hours, then it's worth it, right?"

Honestly? No. If a game is truly enjoyable to someone, they should be able to gain as much enjoyment playing a 5 hour game 20 times as they would playing a 100 hour game once. I'm sure we've all poured countless hours into our favorite multiplayer game and those don't change whether you've put in 1 or 1000 hours. (barring patches, of course)

Is battling against more powerful enemies using more powerful weapons at the 75 hour mark fundamentally different from the battles you had at the 5 hour mark? If not, then I'd say your game is too long.

I would say No in some games, but yes in others. Games like starcraft and chess become rapidly more complex the higher level you can take them. Professional play is much different from lower levels, and due to the 2 player nature of the games, mindgames can exist that can take the game to a theoretical infinite skill ceiling. (i think?) (you know what i mean?)

All games should be like Disgaea (I've only played the first one)... you could probably beat the main storyline in a few hours, but for the hardcore you can continue to find new challenges for dozens of hours after that. The vast majority of the game is entirely optional and continually challenging. Sounds like the kind of design you'd appreciate :)

I see a lot of people comparing this on a literary level, so I'm going to play devil's advocate for a minute. Let's ask this instead: Would 100 hours of chess be worth 100 hours of Tolstoy? How about 100 hours of Go? Would it makes a difference if instead of a game board you used a computer to play?

The point is, while it's clear that reading Tolstoy can be mind expanding, there's no reason why games can't be mind expanding as well. At the given time, I highly doubt there are any games that equal Tolstoy in terms of literary worth, but there are other kinds of perfectly legitimate value as well.

And sure, there are plenty of examples of games that don't expand your mind at all, but the OP's question is essentially asking about the best game, not the average game or every game.

Go & Chess both have rules and strategies that have been explored for centuries. The strategy and rules to these churning video games are arbitrary/trial and error at best. Not to mention that in general Go & Chess are played against another human. To me playing a multiplayer computer game is fun whereas playing a solo game feels soul crushing.

But again, why are we arbitrarily choosing 'cultured' people when we could choose, say, engineer types? (I'm an engineer myself -- I'm not saying we're not cultured, but it's safe to say that a lot of us prefer expanding our mind by doing things as opposed to reading things.)

This question holds the danger of conflating two VERY different questions with two entirely different answers:

Can 100 hours of any videogame produced now be worth 100 hours of Tolstoy? No.

Can 100 hours of any videogame which MIGHT theoretically be able to be produced if tremendous social changes make it possible for actual valuable content to exist in the videogame market? Yes.

If any other form of media had ever been censored from its birth as savagely as videogames are, they would similarly look childish and suffer with seeming like the media is incapable of communicating deep messages. The ESRB, BBFC, OFLC, and their sister organizations across the world work ardently and reduce videogames to an extremely immature level of expression. Some day, people might actually destroy those organizations and videogames could then become a very important medium with deeply significant works being made available.

Never forget - books are interactive. Movies are interactive. Put them down, put them on pause, fast-forward through parts, flip to a random page, etc. Just because a viewer CAN subvert the ability of the content creators to communicate a certain message has no impact whatsoever on whether the medium can be used for effective communication of deep concepts.

False equivalence is always a nasty, misleading business. How many times have you heard somebody claim that a particular movie was good but the book from which it was adapted is far better? After my eyes return to their uncrossed position, I’m always tempted to ask, what aspect of the book’s cinematography did you find superior? Was there something more lyrical about the book’s orchestral score? Did the characters in the book offer more believable performances? What about the book’s costume design? Makeup? Lighting?

I think I might be too late here, but I was a bit surprised not to see any Dark Souls players in the comments. Let me tell you about my experience with Dark Souls. I came to the game knowing it was hard, but I was still cocky. I expected to come in swinging and things would die. That is not Dark Souls. I died, many times. But the key to Dark Souls is every time you die, you should be learning something. This is a game that teaches you to learn from your mistakes, and to try again using your new found knowledge. There are few cheap tricks, and most deaths can be avoided if you are careful. So it's also a game that teaches patience, to stop and observe your environment before you take action. To not get cocky and rush through something you've done before. It's a very humbling experience. You may not get the same intellectual stimulation as you might from reading Tolstoy, but that doesn't mean there is no value over those 100 hours above pure entertainment. Dark Souls has taught me a new sense of discipline, and I've noticed those changes bleeding through, both into other games as well as into my real life. And this is something Dark Souls does that a book cannot: it's one thing to tell someone something, but many lessons cannot just be told, they must be learned through experience.

What no one talks about when they praise Dark Souls is what it means—what immemorial questions of human nature its difficulty and disorder evoke. Instead, the game is good because playing makes you feel good, and that goodness is amplified by the recent memory of having been very bad at the game, of taking wrong turns and mistiming attacks against zombies. Think of Dark Souls as a self-esteem kit for people who can take marching orders from giant talking snakes called Kingseeker Frampt and Darkstalker Kaathe without withering a little inside.

I think this is a good point. Video games have gotten progressively easier--as in easier to understand and "win" (if they're winnable). There are good reasons for this, but the "logic" and "beauty" inherent in storytelling gets eclipsed (frequently) for accessibility.

But yeah, while not rising to the value of reading Tolstoy-level books, I do believe games have value for a person, in developing focus, reactions - and, well, basically giving you an exhilarating time, with no harm to others, as far as playing the game itself is concerned. I rank games above clubbing, drinking, etc., which I do believe should be obvious.

I rank games above clubbing, drinking, etc., which I do believe should be obvious.

That's like, your opinion, man. It's all very subjective, really... Having said that, though, why do we have to rank everything? Sometimes things can just be different; not everything has to be "better" or "worse" than everything else.

It might seem like a pointless exercise but I have started the strength training program mentioned and intend to do a comparison on what it means after 12 weeks. Even if I just think of my body as my meatspace avatar 36 hours of wow goldfarming might get me a new look online but I am interested to see what the same effort offline will do more for me.

On the other hand, once someone spends the time to read a long book, they are in a prime position to have cognitive dissonance inflate their perception of the book so that they will not think the time was wasted.

I completely agree. To add to that, games often times have parallels which I learn through. Fallout New Vegas, although not considered the best game ever made, taught me more than any teacher ever taught me about Roman History. I learned about Cato and Lucius, something I doubt a Russian novel beyond my youthful attention span could do.

I saw Bissell's name and immediately have a harder time taking this article seriously. Bissell has had an agenda against videogames for not being "literary" in the way that books are literary and considers them a lesser medium because of it, even though these are two entirely different media that can't be held to the same standards because their means and purposes are wildly different. You shouldn't feel the same way after reading War and Peace as you would feel finishing the Mass Effect series.

I could almost understand critcizing gaming as a field but comparing retrospectively vaunted works of literature with this year's commercial success, put on pedestal by consumer-interest publications not critics? That doesn't make any sense.

This is an interesting review but the entire argument hinges on a lot of assumptions. To an untrained reader, Tolstoy may appear nonsensical and a serious waste of time with no real benefit. They may not be literate enough to even see the apparent themes of the text. And what quantifiable value are we assuming the understanding of these themes to have anyway?

Playing 100 hours of dark souls may very well have no real practical value. But in the end it's just an experience, and an enjoyable, frightening, emotional rollercoaster. But it's not only the emotional sentiments, as the writer points out, involved in enjoying the experience. Playing any game is a fun exercise in playing with and understanding systems. The more you begin to understand these, you see the value of that quickly. In other words, you're way better at fucking up demons. Likewise, the more you re-read a text, you're likely to form a better understanding of the ideas within.

Imagine if War and Peace were 5,000 pages instead of 1,400, and imagine if, whenever you came to a word you didn't understand, a gust of wind appeared and pushed you back five pages, forcing you to reread everything you'd made it through up until that point

Oddly, I feel that trying to read War in Peace in Russian as someone who does not know Russian is about that exact experience. The analogy is strangely apt, as Dark Souls is not a game for a gamer who is not deeply experienced in gaming. (and I just used game in 3 variations in a single sentence. I am not proud of that). If you wanted something that was a shallow simple game, then playing Lego Star Wars would likely be a better way to use time.

When making the case for Dark Souls, almost every defender stumbles into the affective fallacy, wherein the value of a work is tied to the emotions it dredges up from its audience.

WHAT? Did he just defy logic to support his hatred for this game? REREAD IT. Don't want to play guessing games? Here:

the affective fallacy, wherein the value of a work is tied to the emotions it dredges up from its audience.

THEN WHAT gives any work of art, whether literature, music, paintings, sculptures, or even video games their GODDAMNED value then, O' WISE SEER OF KNOWLEDGE?

What is the value of art OTHER than evoking emotion in it's audience? What other value does art have than the EXPERIENCE you get from it? WITHOUT the experience, paintings are just mere smears of paint on a canvas, sculptures are just lumps of dried clay or stone, music is just tones strung together, and video games are just GB's of 1's and 0's. NOTHING of artistic value has ANY VALUE other than the experience you take away from it!

If the experience doesn't matter, then destroy ALL recordings of music, and burn down all the museums - because they are a monumental waste of time and money.

The information and stories they give us can allow people to look at elements of their lives in a new light, change their philosophies or ideologies, or just develop ones view on the "human condition" to name a few other than emotion.

I completely comprehend his point, don't agree with a word of it. Compare apples to apples. Tolstoy's works, while obviously valuable, are incapable of teaching you problem solving or critical thinking skills in themselves (these are exercises left to the reader), not to mention tangential skills sometimes obtained from video games like map reading (recent studies have shown increases in spatial awareness in those who play video games, though I'm too lazy to look it up. I wouldn't be surprised if it was linked from this subreddit, though). All you really have to do in order to say you "read" a book is to absorb the information contained therein. You acquire knowledge, and not skills - we ought to compare like activities.

I like how he says that the game doesn't teach you in 100 hours anything it couldn't teach you in a couple.

I feel the same way about most novels. With the exception of a few of my favorites, most novels could say in 100 pages what they take 700. I actually prefer to read philosophy, as the author comes out and says what the thinks about human nature, et al, instead of couching in fables and allegories. But then there are those that wish philosophers would just come out and say what they mean, and that it shouldn't take 500 pages to say that the world exists or that we can understand words.

Perhaps, then, this isn't a criticism of gaming worth addressing, as it isn't for the other forms, either.

Indeed, sometimes I wonder if long-winded writing is adapted to take advantage of human cognitive dissonance, which would tend to inflate the perceived importance of something into which one has already sunk a lot of time.

You can't compare the 2 like that, and it's not just because they're apples and oranges. More importantly, it's subjective to each individual. There is no objective answer to "which is better'.

Tolstoy is fucking thick. I mean really a shit ton of words. Not everyone has that kind of attention span to read the whole thing. So if you force someone to sit down and spend 100 hours reading it, he probably wasted 100 hours of his time. Because he simply cannot appreciate what "classic" it is. Not because he's dumb, but Tolstoy simply doesn't appeal to him. He won't feel any emotion, he won't appreciate any beauty in the prose. He'll just be reading a book. Probably one he finds really damn boring.

However, if video games appeals to that same person, he might be better off spending 100 hours on video games. He might make friends in an MMO. He might get a great adrenaline rush from an MW game. And similar to reading a book he enjoys, he might go on an emotional roller coaster ride and fall in love with characters and be emotionally invested in a game with a strong story, maybe Portal 2 for example.

Asking a person to spend 100 hours on Tolstoy when he doesn't understand/appreciate/enjoy it at all would be a complete waste of time as compared to if he got a positive experience out of playing 100 hours of video games.

I'm new to this subreddit, but single player games seem to have gone down the wrong road. I had fun playing early Sierra and LucasArts games with friends, because we would help eachother along. As soon as so many long popular games became the norm, I had to go solely multiplayer. There are no serious story games. There are some interactive fiction games that are interesting, but I have seen no major game that has come close.

I didn't care much for the article but the question is pretty interesting. What goals should we be judging this worth against? To put it another way what is the point of life? I think it has to be something to do with self awareness and happiness and sadness. As poorly defined as that is in my mind it makes me, essentially, a hedonist. Bettering yourself is worthwhile because the strength of character it brings should bring you (or someone else) joy or reduce sadness and disappointment at life. That said, these are essentially qualitatively the same as present happiness, possibly with some discounting factor due to the possibility of being hit by a bus before your strength of character pays off. If you enjoy playing games enough then it's worth it, if you don't, it's not. There's really not a lot more to it than that.

I have played hundreds of hours of twilight imperium (board game) with the same people and I'm sure I've learnt about all of them and myself during that time. I'm sure it has been an edifying experience as well as being fun as fuck.

100 hours of Tolstoy would kill me. I found Anna Karenina extremely boring, and I am not even an anti-intellectual type, I like to read philosophy, but literature of this type... I don't even know what makes it a classic. It hardly teaches anything 2 pages of Aristotle cannot teach much more efficiently.

the question makes no sense on a couple levels. first, comparing two mediums, and needing one of them to be "worth more" in this vague but somehow all-encompassing way is layman's snobbery at it's most idiotic. second, it's not even comparing two different mediums. it's comparing a medium to an author, which doesn't even warrant an answer.

there's way better ways of disguising this stupid question and making it seem intelligent. fortunately however, the idiocy flaunts itself openly, warning the reader to not approach further.

Why are we comparing videogames (which are generally made accessible to the average player... and let's be real, the average player is an idiot) to Tolstoy and other classic literature? We should be comparing videogames to "literature" like the Twilight series. It's entirely possible that game designers could create an enjoyable game that calls upon players to use real-world skills, and teaches skills that will be applicable in the real world. But games like that would not be popular among the majority of players, just as Tolstoy is not popular among the majority of readers.

You can accomplish a lot in 100 hours. You could read War and Peace, for instance, then follow it up with Thus Spoke Zarathustra

YEAH. I took me 4 1/2 months to read Moby Dick, and around 3 to read the Three Musketeers. Of course I only read when I went to the shitter, but still. Try to tackle War & Peace in 100 hours - go ahead, speed reading champion.

On another note, War & Peace was FUCKING BORING. Give me a 100-hour vidjagame ANY DAY over that crap.

On another note still - YES, 100+ hour videogames ARE worthwhile. WHY do you think people play RPGs? It's surely not for the nail-biting, high intensity white-knuckle thrills - that's for sure.

RPG's are STORY DRIVEN. Why do you think meat-heads that masturbate to Call of Duty FUCKING HATE RPGs? Because they HAVE TO READ. It's isn't just mindless killing, wash, rinse, repeat. If, as Chris Rock said, that books are like Kryptonite to a nigga, RPG's are like RED KRYPTONITE to FPS fanboys.